Mr. Speaker, this will be the last time I get to speak on behalf of my constituents of Sackville—Musquodoboit Valley—Eastern Shore on probably the most important piece of legislation facing us probably in the history of my career as a politician, being a new one in the House.
When the bill came out of committee it actually had some teeth to it. However, after the Liberals got a hold of it—with the exception of the members for Lac-Saint-Louis, Davenport and York North—they sat back, along with some of their colleagues in the Reform Party, and said that the bill was too strong and they could not have this. I find this absolutely disgusting.
It will not happen today or even tomorrow, but eventually down the road my children are going to ask me why our environment is more polluted than it was in 1999? I will tell them that it was because the government of the day, along with the official opposition, sat back and did absolutely nothing. They caved into industry standards and industry wishes and wants.
My children will one day ask me what I did to stop them. I will reply that I tried to do everything in the parliamentary atmosphere to raise the issue. The member for Churchill River, the member for Yukon, our leader from Halifax and the entire New Democratic Party, federally and provincially across the country from coast to coast to coast, have been raising the issue of the environment for years.
I can guarantee members a $1,000 Canadian that nobody on the backbench, with the exception of a few of them, ever read Rachel Carson's Silent Spring , the environmental handbook. This was a woman with all the courage in the world who stood up to big polluters and big corporations in the early 1960s, when it was not popular to be green, and told the world what was happening to our natural environment.
Allow me to talk about a few things the government has been doing. We have had three consecutive environment committee reports critical of inaction and non-protection. This is a government that leaves sick children in their homes for over a year beside the Sydney tar ponds and Sysco site until the toxic goo shows up in their basements. The Liberals say they are moving these people, not because of health reasons but for compassionate reasons. It is absolutely unbelievable.
The Liberals do not have the courage to stand up and accept responsibility for major catastrophic failures when it comes to the environment. This is a government that chooses to leave over one million tonnes of radioactive waste leaking into Great Bear Lake in the Northwest Territories. This is a government that says it takes protecting Canada's freshwater resources seriously. Unbelievable.
Great Bear Lake is Canada's fourth largest supplier of freshwater. Rather than act, the government pays lip service to the community and promises and re-promises action. Still nothing has been done to contain or remedy the problem. The waste is on a federal government abandoned site.
This is a government that last night voted, with the exception of three Liberal members, against evidence presented by its own scientists that hormone disrupting substances have been found leaving pig farms and entering into waterways. No action was taken. The Liberals voted against this information. Whatever the Liberals do they do not want to upset the polluter. My God, we would certainly not want to upset the polluters who have destroyed our environment.
What happened to protecting Canadians? Why not place a warning that this is an occurring and recurring action? Why can we not tell Canadians the truth about what we are doing to our environment?
The NDP proposed a series of motions to follow the effort of the United States to provide a safer environment for their children. All we asked was to include consideration of the special susceptibility of children faced with environmental contaminants as a reference point when investigating substances.
If the members of the Liberal government or the Reform Party had a green bone in their body or morals beyond the lobby pockets, they could have acted proactively. The choice to defeat this proactive precautionary measure was made on the same day an article appeared in the Ottawa Citizen dealing with the growing concern of pesticide risk.
To quote Julia Langer, toxicologist for World Wildlife Fund Canada:
—the regulatory process is deeply flawed. Pesticides are based on the average adult male's exposure and sensitivity to a product, a system that overlooks the vulnerability of children and women, and does not take into account a person's total exposure.
Our motion would have been to consider children when spending the millions of dollars on research, with specific considerations proposed in the United States and other countries. The Liberal government says it will spend millions of dollars on research. What will the government do with the information when it gets it?
The previous statement I gave mirrors the executive order signed by President William Jefferson Clinton in 1997, to direct government agencies to consider children's vulnerability and susceptibility in policy and regulatory considerations in 1997.
For the environment minister to stand before Canadians in the House, or on television, and state that Bill C-32 is the best environmental legislation in the world is a statement that needs to be clarified. It is really the best polluter protection legislation in the world.
On April 21, 1997 the President of the United States ordered by the authority vested in him as president by the constitution and the laws of the United States of America that a growing body of scientific knowledge demonstrated that children might suffer disproportionately from environmental health risks and safety risks. He said that these risks arose because children's neurological, immunological, digestive and other bodily systems were still developing; that children eat more food, drink more fluids and breathe more air in proportion to their body weight than adults; that children's size and weight might diminish their protection from standard safety features; and that children's behavioural patterns may make them more susceptible to accidents because they are less able to protect themselves.
Therefore, he said, that to the extent permitted by law and appropriate and consistent with the agency's mission, each federal agency should make it a high priority to identify and assess environmental health risks and safety risks that might disproportionately affect children and should ensure that its policies, programs, activities and standards addressed disproportionate risks to children which result from environmental a health risk or safety risk.
I received a postcard today from a friend of mine, Mr. Derek Jones of Newellton, Nova Scotia. His big concern is the effects of dragging and the technological gear that we use when it comes to fishing.
Off the east coast of Nova Scotia in Shelburne are some of the most beautiful coral reefs in the world. Some of those reefs are called the bubble gum coral, the bushy acanella and the black tip coral. They take hundreds of years to grow. In a few minutes a dragger will come buy and sweep these things away. There is absolutely nothing in the bill to protect those species with which we share the planet.
I plead with the government one last time. I have two young daughters, Jasmin Aurora who is 11 and Amber Ocean who is 8. My wife and I named those two children after the environment: Aurora for aurora borealis, the northern lights, and Amber Ocean because of the colour when the sunset goes down on the water. It turns it into an amber colour and we call her Amber Ocean. We believe firmly, strongly and lovingly in our environment, that the environment protects us. The environment is us. It is everything that we do.
For parliamentarians and legislators to fail in the protection of our children and other species with which we share the planet is an absolute disgrace. I ask every member of the House to vote with theirs hearts, with foresight and with conviction, not to vote with what the cabinet said or what some industry person said.
They should do the right thing for once in their lives and vote against the bill, send it back to the committee, allow the committee to revamp it the way it was when it came out of committee, and not allow any more amendments to the bill from the government side. All they did was water it down and weakened it. Instead of protecting our environment, in essence it protects the industry and the polluters of the country. It is an absolute disgrace.
The member for Churchill River and his assistant, Mr. Dave Campbell, have spent a tremendous amount of time working on this bill and its amendments. They have worked with various environmental groups, other agencies and industry to come up with solutions or a long term fix to our problems. Mr. Campbell worked tirelessly on this portfolio day after day, month after month. There is probably no one in the country who has worked harder on it than Mr. Campbell.
The hon. member for Churchill River knows exactly what I am talking about because Mr. Campbell works for him. They have formed a great team. On behalf of the New Democratic Party from coast to coast to coast I wish to publicly thank the member for Churchill River, the member for Lac-Saint-Louis, the member for York North, the member for Davenport, and the other members who assisted in getting the bill out of committee as it was.
Unfortunately the government got its hands on the bill afterward. It changed it and made it much weaker. The bill does nothing to protect the livelihood of aboriginal people, children, farmers, fishermen, and other people who use our resources on a day to day basis. That is most unfortunate.
If we do not learn from history, we will reap what we sow and we will rue the day we made this decision. Again I ask the Liberals to have a free vote, vote with their consciences, do what is right and think of their children. In the words of my aboriginal friends from the Mi'kmaq nation of Nova Scotia, let us think in seven generation principles, think of our great, great-grandchildren before we vote today.
